One of the most wonderful things about Donald Trump is that he forces people and organizations to reveal who they are. He is the living embodiment of Confucius’s theory about the “rectification of names,” which says that things must be properly seen and identified for a society to function. The media once presented themselves as dignified truthtellers, but, thanks to Trump, we see that they are really laughable hacks—and nothing more perfectly shows that than the New York Times’s “fact-check” regarding Kamala’s alleged stint at McDonald’s.

Over the years, Kamala and her friends have spilled a lot of ink and generated even more pixels about her childhood and career. What they kept on the lowdown, except for an obscure reference in 2019, was that Kamala worked at McDonald’s for a summer while she was in college. This was an interesting omission, considering that most politicians like to show that they are “of the people” rather than “above the people.”

Image: New York Times building (edited) from a photo by ajay-suresh (CC BY 2.0).

In this election cycle, however, as it’s become clear that Kamala’s and the Democrats’ economic policies are and will be disastrous for the people, Kamala has suddenly remembered that long-ago McDonald’s stint.

Pause a minute here and think how the media would cover this revelation if Kamala were a Republican. You don’t need to guess. You can just look at history. Steven Hayward takes us back 12 years to Mitt Romney’s run for president:

Anyone recall how the media devoted substantial resources back in 2012 to investigate Mitt Romney’s prep school days, complete with tracking down classmates and school records? Apparently it wasn’t enough to report the massive scandal that Romney put a dog on the roof of his car once on a family trip. (Never mind literally killing someone with his bare hands when his private equity company upset someone’s health insurance.) No—the American electorate needed to know that as an adolescent prep schoolboy Romney had given a noogie to a classmate. The monster.

And if that’s an insufficient reminder of the energy the media will show when it comes to investigating a Republican’s past, look at the media frenzy about Sarah Palin in 2008. There was no part of her past too minute to investigate.

But the standards are different when it’s a Democrat. The media, rather than investigating and, presumably, proving that Barack Obama’s birthplace was on the up-and-up, simply screamed at conservatives to “shut up.” They did the same about Obama’s academic history. (I’ve long had my own theory about both his citizenship and his academic record.)

So, here we are in 2024, and, to no one’s surprise, the media’s lack of curiosity about a Democrat candidate’s past remains intact. This time, we’ve been told to shut up about Kamala’s claim that she worked behind the counter at McDonald’s. However, with Trump doing the best troll in political history by actually working behind the counter at a McDonald’s, The New York Times felt it had to speak up.

Now, like some of you, I’m old enough to remember when the Times still had some gravitas. Sure, it was always left-wing (Walter Duranty, anyone?), but it still pretended to do the research before publishing its essays. Now, though, most of the media simply relay Democrat party press releases. The Times’s latest article about Kamala’s alleged McDonald’s bona fides is no different. The following deathless words about her stint frying fries are from that article’s heading and subheading:

Kamala Harris and McDonald’s: A College Job, and a Trump Attack

Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that Ms. Harris never worked at the fast-food chain. Her campaign and a friend say she did.

The article starts (of course) by attacking Trump, saying that, not only is he guilty of daring to question Obama’s all-American birth, but he’s also just lying when he says that Kamala didn’t work at McDonald’s. The evidence? Well, let’s just say it’s slender:

Ms. Harris’s campaign said that she was an employee of the McDonald’s on Central Avenue in Alameda, Calif., in 1983 during the summer after her freshman year at Howard University, working the cash register, french-fry station and ice cream machine. It has provided little information beyond that, including how long she worked there. She also mentioned her job at McDonald’s when she ran for president in 2019.

[snip]

The campaign did not make any of Ms. Harris’s friends or family members available for interviews about their recollections of her experience there.

But The New York Times interviewed a friend who had known Ms. Harris as a teenager and remained in touch with the family for years afterward. Wanda Kagan, a close friend of Ms. Harris’s when they attended high school together in Montreal, said she recalled Ms. Harris having worked at McDonald’s around that time.

That’s it. There’s your hard-hitting journalism from the eminent Grey Lady, the “paper of record,” the publication that promises “all the news that’s fit to print.” Ultimately, it boils down to “because we say so,” which I don’t remember being a credo of either the journalistic profession or the Times.

This drek is noteworthy because it comes on the heels of Nicholas Kristof’s risible insistence in that same publication that Israel, having killed Yahya Sinwar, should now surrender in a war it’s winning to ensure Mideast peace and prevent terrorism.

The New York Times is a joke. But sadly, a lot of powerful people still take it seriously.